


endless st-a-a-aa-tic sea

by capo (gliss)



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Game Spoilers, Gen, Introspection, Loss of Identity, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 14:58:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4568811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/pseuds/capo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>{ He’s washing his hands when he sees it: a soft, poisonous lick of red in his eye. It’s a disease, an infection or a virus.</p>
<p>Probably. }</p>
<p>Komaeda wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	endless st-a-a-aa-tic sea

**Author's Note:**

> for alida whom i hope to do right by re: komaeda forever.   
>  **warnings for** komaeda basically. despair. standard stuff from the games. there's a little bit of implied abuse that goes hand in hand with the komaeda warning. this may or may not contradict canon; i honestly do not remember. also, nothing is explained (if you'd like explanations, feel free to ask and see what madness i come up with). but thank you if you give this a shot!   
>  title from bright eyes' "easy/lucky/free" aka if you haven't listened to [this mix](http://8tracks.com/izayaoriharas/dead-seriously) please do it is... a gem.

 

 

The bathroom is just down the hall – two doors down, past another room and a little office – but it feels like an age away to Komaeda.

The hospital slippers are white and scratchy, trap heat on the bottom and thin and flimsy across the bridges of his feet. It’s quiet, a three-in-the-morning quiet with the soft buzz of dim fluorescent lights and the absence of a nurse (bandages and blunt-cut bangs, devotion and blind worship leaking tears down a soft and pretty little face, thighs spread wide open and _disgusting, disgusting, disgusting_ ) or a doctor or –

His hand catches against the doorframe. One hand. Spindly white fingers, jutting bones and starved knuckles, veins shadow-blue.

The other hand is –

Komaeda breathes in quietly, so as to not be heard by the ghosts. He laughs like a summons. He walks into the bathroom, gown trailing behind him, a funeral flag.

The mirrors in the bathroom are clean, more or less – cleaner than horror-story mirrors are supposed to be.

(Horror story? He supposes. The quiet and the crackle and the distortions in his head tell him so.)

He examines himself. Skin still pale, hair still white – he’s a dead boy stuffed into the body of a living one, or maybe the other way around, a desperate rabid little beast scrabbling for survival in a body that’s already set in a grave. His eyes look fake, smooth and pale as sea glass, shells of utterly no value. His bones sing and dance, rip up through translucent skin, veins rising to visibility to map out places of his deaths, a cobweb of hope and despair grafted into his flesh.

So, still the same Komaeda. What luck!

But it doesn’t last long, of course. He’s washing his hands when he sees it: a soft, poisonous lick of red in his eye. It’s a disease, a virus or infection.

He grasps at his bangs with his remaining hand and pulls them back, tugs hard and harder, leans over the sink to dig his elbow into the glass to steady himself.

And then someone else bursts into the bathroom: loud footsteps, a rustling of clothing.

Komaeda’s eyes refocus.

Hinata is there, tall and strong, worry stone-like on his face before it all melts away at once and the stubborn set of his mouth softens and the color in his face comes back. “Komaeda?”

His voice – got deeper, perhaps.

Komaeda smiles mirthlessly. “Hinata-kun.”

His eyes are brighter.

Hinata doesn’t move, evidently picking up on the complete lack of genuine pleasure in his voice, so Komaeda speaks again, turning away from the mirror and the poppy-red flicker in his eye and gesturing with his handless arm. He tells himself it’s not on purpose, but that would be a lie. “Did you miss me, Hinata-kun?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

(before)

Parts of consciousness intact.

There are parts of Komaeda alive and parts of him that _aren’t_ alive. It feels like glass splinters grinding together, trying to become whole, and it’s a terrible feeling, because – inconsistent as he is, twisted and mangled and distorted as he is, he’s always been one _whole_ person, a whole boy, his own self and his own dumb luck.*

 

* Except, when he wasn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

(now)

Hinata flicks on the lamp next to his bed and it tosses a warmer cast across the entire room.

“I looked for you,” he says quietly, and Komaeda recognizes that voice, tight with pain he doesn’t want others to hear. He’s never known it up close, how hot and half-angry it is, and he thinks maybe he understands a little more the trials, the way murderers would blurt out their life stories. There’s something in Hinata’s voice that inspires tragedy to be shared. “I went into your room and you weren’t there, I thought –”

“I don’t care.”

Komaeda makes it a point to look straight at Hinata’s eyes when he says it, sinks the sharp corner of his mouth into his words to make it bleed its true colors (honesty? falsehood? he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know). Something shakes in Hinata’s eyes. It looks like – pity, or a deep, wounded sadness, and Komaeda has to get as far away from it as possible; Hinata’s warm like the sun, nourishing, but Komaeda’s skin has always been sensitive to light like that, scraped raw and tender by a heat that was never meant to scar.

It’s wrong, it’s wrong.

He wants to scoot closer.

It is kind of ironic that they’d washed up on a beach, of all places in the game: the place where natural sunlight outshone the mediocre sheen of a talentless tumble of bones.

“ _I_ care,” Hinata interrupts, and it surprises him – but then again, Hinata always had, in some way, and Komaeda always knew him to be so.

“I wanted to kill you all.” _And still do_.

“You’re my _friend_!”

“You’re nothing,” Komaeda twists, “I’m nothing. We are all nothing, ultimately. Ultimate. Ha, ha.”

Hinata looks like Komaeda had plunged his remaining hand into his gut and yanked on it. That is more or less surprising, too, to be on the receiving end of all this genuine attention, care, something short of fondness (way short, leagues away) but something running deeper than kindness.

“So tell me, Hinata-kun.”

A beat. A breath.

“You’re the mastermind, so you know this. How much of me is myself now, and how much of it is Kamukura Izuru?”

 

 

(He’d heard the story when he was still part-Komaeda, and grasped onto it like a fighting dream. In the instant before waking, he’d snatched at the crucial facts ( _var_ Hinata Hajime = Kamukura Izuru; a computer program running; one of those evil looking computer chips that shouldn’t fit into any port but somehow did; _enter SSH key_ ; stripping the bits of Hinata away until he was an optimized vessel for The Ultimate Hope) and then brought them with him to the surface.

Waking up had felt like yawning into a long nightmare.

Like waking up in a body not his own.)

 

 

If there is emptiness in emptiness, is the emptiness still empty?

Hinata hesitates, hesitates, and then decides to take the plunge. It’s played out across his face expressively: an instance of helplessness before he remembers that he can’t be helpless, he’s not _allowed_ , and then a momentary suspension before the weight drops and he opens his mouth and says, soft, “you’re just you.”

Komaeda’s mouth opens.

“I thought you could,” Hinata continues, “I thought you could do it on your own, so.”

That is arguably hilarious, and Komaeda laughs to show him so. “That was a trick question, Hinata-kun.” He waves his arm, watches the bandages unravel. Magic, some would say. He knows better – it’s luck, working for him and against him in tandem, his old, unreliable friend. The skin underneath is still healing, a mess of tissue and red, a disgusting sight, but Hinata barely flinches. “When was the last time I was just me?”

 

 

_You don’t have to lie to make friends._

_Komaeda hovers just underneath waking, enough that he can hear the voices as if through film, the edges soft and round and spit-slick. He feels tired and dead. The voices continue. The lie permeates through the film of his consciousness like golden honey, sweet and overwhelming._

_“There were several procedures,” says one of the voices, “it would have been such a waste to –”_

_“– thank you for your contributions, Hinata-kun –”_

_“Uh. Yeah.”_

_That last voice, he knows. There’s a complete lack of character in it, but it settles like a soft palm to his cheek._

_There **is** a soft palm at his cheek._

_“Come on, Komaeda.”_

_Then– a murmur of something at his forehead._

 

 

A bone-sick thickness weighs down in his chest. Then, abruptly, it rises up and spits out of his mouth. “What did you do to me, Hinata-kun? Did you think I was just as hopeless and mediocre as you?”

Hinata looks sickened, his face shadowed, lamplight casting slivers of yellow around the edges.

“I won’t be anything anymore. Ah, that’s right. The threat was still there, wasn’t it? What a tragedy. A second uprising– no, a third? Another uprising would be too much to handle. You had to make sure. _What did you do to me, you worthless piece of shit_?”

His eyes begin to sting. Something wet is running down his face; he hopes it’s blood, because that would make the most sense, wouldn’t it – Komaeda does not cry when he is upset, he bleeds. When he loves, he bleeds. When he is happy, he bleeds. For such a pale person, he leaves a lot of colors behind.

And Hinata – no, Kamukura, he leaves behind something else entirely.

“I didn’t – they wanted to.”

The straining coil inside of Hinata breaks and breaks again, and then Komaeda is breaking with it, prying himself wide open and then curling it all away, reaching out but shrinking back, not committing.

“I didn’t want them to.”

“But it happened anyway, _God_ , you’re so incompetent, aren’t you? You’re just a little bit useless, aren’t you, Hinata-kun?”

“You were _dying_!” Hinata is on his feet, hands balled up at his sides. “You– you knew, anyway, you were dying, you were going to die before anything worked out, and they just wanted to toss you away. They saw your hand, they saw _her_ hand.” He takes a breath, and Komaeda sees it, in the distance through the window and behind his eyelids, her wild hair and her poppy-red nail polish and her beautiful, pretty eyelashes, her voice a promise of everything he’s ever wanted in the world. She brought him in so easily, like a cheap disposable thing, and he only ever told her half of what he wanted to say, did half of what he wanted to do.

Because she’s Enoshima Junko, and he is tethered to the tide of fortune.

Because she knew how to use it, and he knew how to surrender to it.

“You don’t deserve to be tossed away,” says Hinata.

Komaeda looks at him and sees the embodiment of a cold calculation, eyes digital-red. “But you do.”

But he doesn’t feel like justice served when Hinata makes a sound close to pure anguish. He feels exhaustion settling into him, cold at the small of his back, an ache in his temple.

Hinata holds out a pathetic piece of cloth. So he was wrong. They were tears, after all. “No one does, Komaeda. It’s facts.”

“Tell me what they did first.”

“I told you, they just –”

“Tell me.” Komaeda licks his lips as a preparation of whatever bitter truth he has to taste.

Then Hinata does a questionable thing – he reaches over and starts to wipe off Komaeda’s face with the limp little handkerchief. There’s a look on his face that Komaeda doesn’t understand, but his hands are steady, and he applies too much pressure the way a boy his age tends to do.

_You’ll break me_ , Komaeda thinks for a frightening moment, but he doesn’t break; he hadn’t realized how cold he was or how badly he’d wanted to be touched and warmed.

“They didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, Komaeda.” Hinata’s words come right up against his cheek. “I asked them not to.”

“But I am not – whole.”

Hinata looks surprised for a moment, and then he smiles. His eyes aren’t red at all; they’re calm green, the color of the unfailing earth. “That thing you’re missing, Komaeda.”

Komaeda stills, his tears drying.

“It’s loneliness.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_no, don’t– he’ll hate it._

_it’s the only way._

_but i **know** him, i know him, i trust him._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So the others aren’t awake, he asks.

Time ticks by silently; outside the deep ink of the sky rinses itself out into a pale, pretty blue. Komaeda refuses to look at him, because looking at him would mean having to face all of that care and sadness all over again. Hinata can try to hide it all he wants, but the only person who ever understood him and shared his dreams and saw the way the stars aligned has always been Komaeda.

All the same, he turns his head.

“Not yet,” Hinata admits. He’s brightening already, tangling his hand up into his short hair, “but since you woke, we think it won’t be long, now.”

He looks a little bit shy, even: the angles of his face are all soft, eager. Komaeda wants to kiss him a little bit. Once upon a time, he would have, and he would have hated himself for it. Now he just feels himself making the same shy face right back at him, the tightness around his eyes relaxing, something like happiness peaking around around the edges of his eyes, young and tender as new grass.

Hope is a little bit contagious, and everything looks better early in the morning, anyway.

 

 

(And Kamukura?

He’ll always be around, Hinata says.

No matter what?

No matter what.

But it’s okay like that?

...yeah. It’s okay like this.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Thank you, Hinata-kun.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

//  **end**.


End file.
